Datta Jayanti & Annapurna Jayanti 2026: The Purnima Date

Short answer first. Datta Jayanti, the birth observance of Dattatreya, is kept on the evening of Wednesday, 23 December 2026. Calendars that tie Margashirsha Purnima’s bath and charity to a morning do not all agree, and in 2026 they have a sound reason not to: at New Delhi this full-moon tithi never sees a sunrise, while in much of eastern and southern India it does. The rest of this page shows the arithmetic behind both statements.

A Purnima Between Two Sunrises (मार्गशीर्ष पूर्णिमा)

The Purnima of Margashirsha opens at 10:47 on 23 December 2026 and closes with the full moon itself at 06:58 on 24 December 2026. The closing instant is the DE421 full moon in the site’s lunation table. The opening one is not in any festival row; it is computed with the site’s own lunar code, which agrees with the generated tables to within 1 minute on the 86 tithi instants where both exist, and which here lands the end of the tithi on the same minute as the DE421 full moon.

Now set those two instants against the New Delhi sunrises. The sun is up at 07:10 on the 23rd, 3 hours 37 minutes before the Purnima begins, so the daily panchang prints Shukla Chaturdashi for that day. On the 24th the full moon arrives at 06:58 and the sun at 07:10: the Purnima is gone 12 minutes before daybreak, and the day is printed Krishna Pratipada. The run of sunrise tithis reads Shukla Trayodashi, Shukla Chaturdashi, Krishna Pratipada, with no Purnima in it at all. A tithi that holds no sunrise is called kshaya, a “lost” tithi, and this one is 20 hours 11 minutes long and still loses out by a margin smaller than a quarter of an hour.

Nothing is missing from the sky. The tithi exists, it simply happens between two mornings, and every rule for placing a Purnima observance on the civil calendar then has to decide which neighbouring day inherits it. The answer depends on the observance.

Dattatreya’s Day Is Kept at Dusk (दत्त जयंती)

For Datta Jayanti the question does not arise. The Datta temples and households of Maharashtra and north Karnataka keep the janma, the birth, at dusk: the Datta sampradaya places the birth of Dattatreya to the sage Atri and his wife Anasuya in the evening of the Margashirsha full moon, and the temple observance, with its cradle and kirtan, is timed to that hour. What matters is therefore whether Purnima holds the evening, and on the 23rd it does by a wide margin: sunset at New Delhi is 17:29, more than 6 hours after the tithi opened, and the tithi then runs on through the night. The same is true of every city in the table further down, so the Wednesday is the date across India.

In the Datta sampradaya Dattatreya is the single form in which Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are present together, usually shown with three heads and six arms, a cow behind him and dogs at his feet. The tradition’s central Marathi text is the Gurucharitra of Saraswati Gangadhar, which tells the lives of Shripad Shrivallabh and Narasimha Saraswati as avatars of Datta. Many Maharashtrian households and Datta temples read it through in the seven days leading up to the Jayanti, a reading they call the Gurucharitra saptaha. Two of the shrines most closely tied to Narasimha Saraswati in that text are Ganagapur in Karnataka and Narsobawadi on the Krishna in Kolhapur district.

Because the Datta lineages read Dattatreya as the first guru, the day sits alongside Guru Purnima in their year as the other full moon given over to the teacher.

Which Cities Wake Up Inside the Purnima

Bathing and giving on the Purnima, snan-daan, is a morning observance, and calendars that fix it by the tithi at sunrise run into the kshaya directly. Tithi instants are the same everywhere in India; sunrise is not. At this time of year the sun comes up in the east and south well ahead of New Delhi, and for several cities the 24th dawns before the 06:58 full moon. The sunrises below are computed for each city with the site’s solar code, which matches the New Delhi daily table to the minute here.

So a panchang computed for Varanasi, Patna, Kolkata, Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore has a Purnima sunrise on Thursday the 24th, and prints the Purnima snan-daan there; Guwahati has the widest margin, 51 minutes. A panchang computed for New Delhi and Mumbai has none, and falls back on its convention for a kshaya tithi, giving the observance to one of the two days the tithi touches. Cities whose sunrise falls within five minutes of the full moon are left out of the table rather than assigned to either side. Neither kind of calendar has made an error: they apply the same rule to different sunrises. Read the day off a panchang made for your own town, or the panchang calculator set to your city.

Annapurna Jayanti (अन्नपूर्णा जयंती)

North Indian calendars, and the Varanasi custom centred on the Annapurna Devi temple near Kashi Vishwanath, keep Annapurna Jayanti on the same Margashirsha Purnima, with puja to Annapurna, the form of Parvati who holds the ladle and the bowl of food. Where it is kept by the morning tithi it inherits the split described above; where it is kept by the tithi in daylight, the 23rd holds the Purnima from late morning onwards. This page does not choose between them for Annapurna Jayanti. The temple and your family panchang will say which day they keep.

Mrigashira, Ardra and the Month’s Name

The lunar months take their names from the nakshatra near which their full moon falls in the classical scheme, and Margashirsha is named for Mrigashira. In 2026 the match is close but not exact. At sunrise on the 23rd the Moon is in Rohini; it has already moved into Mrigashira by the late morning, when the Purnima opens, and spends most of the tithi there before crossing into Ardra in the early hours of the 24th. The full moon itself, in the DE421 lunation table, therefore falls in Ardra, the nakshatra after Mrigashira, with the Moon in Gemini. That is the data for this year, not a flaw in the month’s name; the nakshatra of a full moon shifts from year to year.

Inside the Dhanu Kharmas (खरमास)

The table’s Dhanu Kharmas, with the Sun in Sagittarius, begins on 16 December 2026 and runs to 14 January 2027; the 23rd is its 8th day, and both readings of the Purnima fall well inside it. The north Indian custom that keeps Kharmas puts off weddings and other samskaras through the window but goes on with vrats, jayantis and daan, so neither Datta Jayanti nor the snan-daan is moved by it. The dates are set out on the Kharmas dates page; the Margashirsha Ekadashi that comes a few days before this full moon is covered in Mokshada Ekadashi and Geeta Jayanti, and the whole month in Margashirsha month 2026.

The Figures in One Place

• Datta Jayanti (dusk): Wednesday, 23 December 2026
• Margashirsha Purnima tithi: 10:47 on 23 December to the full moon at 06:58 on 24 December 2026
• New Delhi sunrises: 07:10 (Shukla Chaturdashi) and 07:10 (Krishna Pratipada); no Purnima sunrise
• Purnima sunrise on 24 December: Varanasi, Patna, Kolkata, Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore
• Full moon nakshatra: Ardra, Moon in Gemini
• Dhanu Kharmas: 16 December 2026 to 14 January 2027

Other dates for the year are in the festival calendar and on the festival pages. In Hindi: दत्त जयंती और अन्नपूर्णा जयंती 2026.